Moving with the Times
A lot has happened since I became editor, but it’s time for a change
THIS IS MY LAST ISSUE editing MaximumPC.
To think I’ve been at the helm for five years is incredible. It’s flown by. Five years that have seen some of the most important advances in the PC’s history, and we’ve covered them all within these very pages. From the rise of core counts, the shift to superfast NVMe SSDs, deep learning within reach of anyone with a notion to do so, dabblings in the virtual realm, and the introduction of real-time ray tracing—it’s been a breathtaking few years, and it feels like there’s plenty more to come.
Casting my mind back to the first issue I edited, the builds at the back of the magazine were notably different from what they are today. For starters, all the machines used Intel CPUs, while now AMD holds sway. Core counts were a fraction of what we have today (even the $2,800 Turbo build only had six cores, although with HyperThreading, that did equate to 12 threads), SSDs were tiny (256GB for the Mid-Range build), memory capacities limited (16GB was more than enough at the top end; 8GB was seen as plenty), and dual-graphics-card setups were still a viable path to extreme power (that Turbo build boasted a pair of GTX 980s at a total cost of $1,100).
While I’m a big fan of most of the changes we’ve seen over those five years (and yes, I’m still hopeful about the future of real-time ray tracing), probably the most important improvement has been on the software side. Back then, we were still rocking Windows 8.1, and boy is Windows 10 an improvement on that halfbaked mess of an interface. Microsoft’s latest OS hasn’t been without its hiccups, but it now works well for the vast majority of work, and has almost managed to make me forget its greatest OS of all time, Windows XP Professional. Almost.